How do you staff a defense project when the budget is fixed by a government and the contract carries late-delivery penalties? A European national security project needed cleared engineers on site under exactly those terms, with a budget set before the search began. Government work removes the usual lever of paying above market, so the search had to win candidates on the project itself.
The engineers were placed, and the project’s milestones were achieved ahead of schedule. The case study explains how the search ran under those constraints: the seats that touched restricted material were priced apart from those that did not, and the money saved on the second group paid for the cleared hires.
A defense team whose project has the same shape, with a fixed envelope, a clearance requirement and a delivery date that does not move, can book twenty minutes on Natalia’s Calendar. We now run that seat-by-seat analysis in the first call, before any sourcing starts, and the team leaves with a straight read on whether the project can be staffed at its budget.